Navigate / search

By Edgar Walters

Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.

Chris Plonsky, Women's Athletics Director at The University of Texas at Austin, interviews David Booth about the James Naismith’s “Original Rules of Basket Ball.” In 2010 Suzanne Deal Booth and David Booth purchased the document, which is currently on display at the Blanton Museum of Art. Photo by Pete Smith.

Janine Barchas, Associate Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, brought students from her class "The Paperback" to visit the Ransom Center for a Halloween show-and-tell. Students in the class dressed in costumes inspired by various paperback imprints. Photo by Pete Smith.Members of the Ransom Center's staff dressed up in costume for Halloween. Photo by Richard Workman.Author and futurist Bruce Sterling tours the exhibition “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Design America” before his keynote talk at the 2012 Flair Symposium “Visions of the Future.” Photo by Pete Smith.

From November 1-3, the Ransom Center will bring together historians, architects, industrial designers, and visionaries in the fields of science fiction, film, theater, and future studies to explore the ways the future has been imagined over time.
Author and curator Phil Patton will moderate one of the symposium panels, “Motorways in the Twentieth Century and Today.”

Patton is the author of Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway, Autodesign International, and Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things that Made America. He has worked on several exhibitions, serving as Curatorial Consultant for Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century (The Museum of Modern Art, 1999) and Co-Curator for Cars, Culture, and the City (Museum of the City of New York, 2010). He writes for The New York Times and teaches at the Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts.

Below are some of Patton’s reading recommendations relating to the symposium theme. Mentioned authors Paul Daniel Marriott and Tom Vanderbilt are also panel participants for “Motorways in the Twentieth Century and Today.”

"Magic Motorways" (Random House, 1940) by Norman Bel Geddes."The Power Broker: Robert Moses & the Fall of New York" (Knopf, 1975) by Robert Caro. "The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today" (Knopf, 2010) by Ted Conover."Space, Time, & Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition" (Harvard University Press, 1941) by Sigfried Giedion."Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory" (HarperCollins, 2010) by Peter Hessler."Saving Historic Roads: Design and Policy Guidelines" (John Wiley and Sons, 1997) by Paul Daniel Marriott. "Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century" (MIT Press, 2010) by William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D. Burns. "Speed Limits" (Skira, 2009) by Jeffrey T. Schnapp."Traffic Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)" (Knopf, 2009) by Tom Vanderbilt.